Forging intercultural communication : Korean readers' collective responses to English feminist texts : focussing on cross-cultural gender differences

Lee, So-Hee

Abstract

This research aims to institutionalize Korean experience in English studies by forging infercultural communication between English texts and Korean readers, interrogating through gender studies. Beginning with the poststructuralist theory on the author, text, and reader relationship in the western European intellectual community, it mostly deals with Korean university students’ responses to English feminist texts such as A Room o f One’s Own, Jane Eyre, The Color Purple, and The Handmaid’s Tale. My main argument is focussed on the cross-cultural gender differences in Korean readers through elaborating the engendering processes in the university classroom. It shows that performing a revisionary reading of the English feminist texts in the Korean university classroom plays a fundamental role in figuring out, shaking, and reforming gender relationships in the “present” Korean cultural context, because reading is the concurrent act to bring forward a transparent map of the intersection of gender and culture. Since the Korean women’s movement and women’s studies during the 1990s has been moving from the issue of women’s rights into the issue of gender and sexuality, Korean university students’ responses illustrate this transforming process of the gender consciousness in contemporary Korean society. Korea is now entering into a new stage of women’s issues, and becoming very conspicuous in terms of the women’s movement from a worldwide perspective. It is now moving into the age of politics of daily lives in the private domain, where each individual has borne witness to struggling with the issues in one’s daily life, like the concept of female sexuality. By enunciating this localized experience on the border line space as a “Korean” “postcolonial” “feminist” critic in “English” studies, I attempt to establish the semiotic ground for the different productions of reference and meaning for cultural translation as well as cultural globality.

Citation

Lee, S.-H. (1997). Forging intercultural communication : Korean readers' collective responses to English feminist texts : focussing on cross-cultural gender differences. (Thesis). University of Hull. Retrieved from https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4223800

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Jan 14, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 24, 2023
• Keywords: Engllish
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4223800
• Additional Information: Department of English, The University of Hull
• Award Date: Sep 1, 1997